


Capricious

by deathwailart



Category: Original Work
Genre: Apocalypse, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Disturbing Themes, Gen, Lovecraftian, Mind Control, Priestesses, Sea Monsters, she doesn't want us there, the sea is a vengeful thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-03
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-12-07 07:54:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/746116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sea reclaims. The sea devours.</p><p>The sea is not a kind mistress. The sea wants strength, she wants devotion, she wants obsession.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Capricious

They linger by the sea and collect their bounty from it but they don't trust it; who can trust such depths, such darkness? But still they are all enthralled and fascinated. Men first go to tame it; the way of men, to seek to bend things to their will and master them but the sea will not do as they wish. They curse it. They compose stories and songs and poems about it and women too share the sea longing. Women perhaps understand it better than the men but they are wiser, more wary. Men compare them endlessly. Some women are flattered by such comparisons, others not but that does not change one important fact. The sea does not want them there. It smashes their ships, hulls and masts beneath the waves with their bounty and too many souls dragged down to the depths. They throw wreaths out to sea and pray to their gods for fair winds, for the sea to be a less harsh mistress each time but the sea does not listen to them. The sea can be still and calm, glass or mirror reflecting blue skies or clouds or she can be a roiling mass, green, dark blue and even grey or brown capped with white peaks as the winds churn it into a violent frenzy. It batters against the rocks enough to eat away the sides of great cliffs. The sea reclaims. The sea devours.  
  
The sea is not a kind mistress. The sea wants strength, she wants devotion, she wants obsession.  
  
There is more to the sea. There are the things that lurk deep within it, further than they can go, things that rest quietly having crept back to their lairs and halls. They are worse than drowning, they are worse than eels, sharks, jellyfish and the many creatures with poisonous barbs or spines they have to contend with. They are forgotten and that is why they sleep.  
  
But they were woken once. They can be woken again. Curiosity kills more than just cats.  


* * *

  
  
She lives in a house by the sea, an old house even by their standards that comes from generation upon generation of their family who all made their fortune from the sea in some way. Shipbuilding, maps for voyages, fishing and whaling, daring reclamation of treasures lost in the strange clanking diving suits that have been developed by eccentrics funded by great wealth. Her room overlooks the sea and she cannot sleep well without it. Lulled to sleep by the siren song of waves lapping at the shore and buffeting sheer rock that looks like fangs if one is brave enough to stand right at the edge where the ground crumbles, always barefoot so toes can curl to keep your footing. The gulls nest there in the cracks along with other seabirds. Men and women often run here to hurl themselves off giving their home a somewhat dubious reputation. She saw someone once, when she was little, too young to know what was happening, someone spreading their arms wide and simply falling. She thought they were trying to fly. She went to try. Her sister caught her, tackled her to the ground so hard she couldn't breathe with the gulls shrieking their protests. Her parents sobbed and shouted and hugged her tight.  
  
She understands now.  
  
In her dreams – nightmares, dreams are things you don't remember but nightmares linger upon the edges of your consciousness in the day, they prey and feast, nipping the way crabs do when you walk barefoot along the shore – she stands upon the edge of the cliff and stares down. Stares beyond the rocks, beyond the inky waters and into something deeper that causes ripples as though something is trying to gulp. There are no words but there are terrible sounds that spill forth. She doesn't understand them. But the words are for her. They stir something deep in her soul. Other dreams there is darkness that wraps around her as tight as the arms of her parents and sister, a heavy tangle, ropes of hair black as night or tendrils of seaweed and kelp, darkness that consumes and restricts her yet keeps her safe. Spirals in spirals and even though she can't see she knows she's descending. More of those strange tongues and when she dreams of them they ripple around her, the lapping of the shore, the burst of bubbles.  
  
Her parents, her sister, her teachers, they are all the wrong people to speak of about her dreams. They laugh them away, dismiss them as flights of fancy from reading or listening to the wrong sort of stories. When they persist doctors are mentioned and when she listens from the top of the stairs they always talk about the time she tried to take flight. She says the dreams are gone. They are relieved and question gently but she always smiles and says she won't read scary stories by lamplight before bed.  
  
In reality the reading only begins then. There are answers that must be found. There is light in the dreams, penetrating whatever it is that cocoons her.  


* * *

  
  
Over years of study she delves deeper. She hungers for knowledge and in time styles herself as some great font of forgotten wisdom with mysterious smiles and knowing glances, leaning forward with steepled fingers to whisper that the sea is a mistress who has subjects other than those of their knowing. She pacifies them with her offerings and many shake their heads and play along. She thinks herself a vassal and learns to dream lucidly to explore their world, these eldritch gods that no one wants to remember even if she sees echoes of them in what they worship now, gods defanged, made safe, enough to tide the truth over for now. She cannot speak their tongue but she begins to understand. She knows. She can _feel_ them and that gives her a certain sort of smugness. Pride cometh before the fall but she forgets that, she ignores that. Folly. She is as proud as sailors and captains and thinks herself safe with her newfound insight.  
  
She's not. She's merely getting closer to what they need, one to hear the whispers, a silly little pawn for them to move as they will, close to the sea. When she tells others – and now they are fearful with wide darting eyes and she as fervent as a priestess, leaning close to whisper words with perfect and precise enunciation – of these monsters that they were enslaved to she is careful to emphasise how they hate humanity, how the sea was the only one to tame them and how she will not hold them back forever. She is right about how little they love mortals beings.  
  
The monsters beneath the waves care nothing for humanity. Not even her. She is merely a tool.  


* * *

  
  
One night she walks when she dreams. Something wet and sticky and red wrapped around her wrist leads her. Warm as fresh blood, pulsing like a heart. Downstairs she goes after pushing back the covers. Down the stairs without a lamp to guide her. Out the front door with its heavy lock and bolt and over lush green grass that tickles her bare feet. Part of her mind tries to rouse itself because something is off but she keeps walking and follows the tug. The moon is full and bright, the stars are out depicting those same things they worship. Her toes curl on the edge of the cliff and then the grip on her wrist is loosed.  
  
She follows.  
  
The wind stings but she is not afraid as she thought she would be. Her hair billows, her dress too. Sails of a ship but her fragile body of flesh and bone does not break and smash against the rocks as a wooden hull would. The great maw beneath the surface engulfs her and black tentacles – not hair, not sea weed or kelp – surround her and keep her safe from drowning.  


* * *

  
  
In the vast nowhere space she forgets much and cares too little. Not quite dead yet but most certainly not fully alive; she might have been upon arrival but that is something she has great difficulty recalling. What she remembers is when her feet touched a tongue rougher than a cat's, lined with sharp little hooks to rasp away and she had opened her mouth to scream but no sooner did she try that when some undulating mass of quivering slick flesh approached. Opening her mouth to draw breath was a bad idea. Now there is a thing wrapped around her heart that forced its way down her throat, a thick slimy wriggling slug of some sort that she could not bring back up no matter how she retched. She can feel it now in her lungs, barbs that make her wheeze when breathes. She will never be free of it, she suspects, it will kill her first or burst free to find some other host, either that or it will keep her alive, forcing her heart to beat, her lungs to take in air, some sort of parasite. It's how she breathes down here perhaps, if she does breathe.  
  
"You," some voice said out of the void, "you are a bridge. A link. You know too much but still so little, who perceives and believes that you are somehow more worthy. You will gain the knowledge you sought now. You will make them remember us."  
  
It is something she is reminded of daily. The voice that makes her trembles as it echoes through the damp cavernous space where water drips down mildewed walls, her breath fogging the air. She presses herself into dirty, disgusting corners that stink of rot and decay, where crumbling brickwork is all that separates from the outside, from a world she cannot see; the windows here show little because her eyes have not adjusted. It is black and grey, nothing more. She must feel her way around with tingling, frozen fingertips, searching for safe spots to hide as fish do in the reefs. There could be things lying in wait, wanting to inhabit and invade the warm haven of her body – the human body is already a perfect home for pestilence and disease and parasites above the land and bodies are washed ashore that have corals and other things growing on them, things within rancid flesh that wriggle and writhe. The malevolent invaders here are something more, something other. They have minds of their own more intelligent than those of men bent to the will of a thing she has not seen or heard yet. They will do as they will here with all the weight of the sea pressing down on her in their ancient prison.  


* * *

  
  
In time she will remember.  


* * *

  
  
Waking up from nowhere space is unexpected, free from the brackish mess of swirling black salt tang water is a shock, as sharp as a knife to the belly. Washed up on the shore they say, naked as the day she was born, blanketed in green kelps. Days spent shuddering under blankets that she tries to kick off (it was all ice where she was, all chill that froze her from the inside out and she is too hot here, itching and burning and she wants to be back even as the thought makes her scream in her sleep) that someone replaces. The same someone who carries her – her legs are as weak as a newborn colt, useless, like jelly (like those things that moved in the pit, things that devoured one another, that feel no pain, that will spread across this world) – so she can vomit. Nothing comes up. Bile catches in her throat, burns until she sobs and wails and that _thing_ sinks tighter, struggles up here on dry land. Struggle makes it strong. The smell of normal food makes her whimper. At night her mind is back where she was before, not only her cell but the sprawling expanse of their great palace beneath the waves. Something akin to an umbilical cord binds her still to that place, to things with a thousand watching eyes that are at once a hazy shape and a sharply angled beast with terrible dripping fangs. Things that made her sick (or made her try, her stomach was too empty, unable to force down their foods and what little she ate only took the edge off and was done under duress of their will) when they spoke or shuddered past her. She swims and drowns in her dreams breathing water as she speaks their tongue as though it is being ripped out of her from some deep spot in her gut and up her throat dragging all her insides with it.  
  
In that place she slept without sleeping. Something else crawled into her body and into her head. In through an ear, burrowing deep as she wept softly in her corner where dead man's fingers cushioned her and she was too tired to fight even if her heart began to beat wildly, struggling in the grip of the creature that sat on her lungs. It burrowed in, wriggled and writhed and made itself a home, somewhere in her brain she thinks because the whispers that began that night came from within her own head. _You take too long to learn our tongue,_ it said.  
  
She wept louder that night because her mind was no longer her own, that last glimmer of a safe haven stolen from her.  


* * *

  
  
In time she hungers. She hungers for salty-sweet jellied flesh that will sting as she swallows. She looks to the sea, she looks down but there is no maw now and she is ravenous for foods she will not find, foods she couldn't stomach before. They will sustain what her body hosts and so she creeps into the kitchen at night to devour fish raw, everything but the bones, things that slither down her throat or squelch, eyes that pop when she sinks her teeth into them. When the fishermen employed by her family bring up nets full of jellyfish she sneaks them away and lets them blister her mouth and tongue with their barbs and doesn't feel nauseous for even a moment.  


* * *

  
  
She was wrong about a lot of things. Oh she was right too but she was wrong about the sea in so many ways. The sea does not keep them calm or placate the horrors in the depths, no the sea merely waits to unleash her children when the time is right, when she has grown bored of their offerings and the lives she takes, the destruction she creates. The storms build and her children begin to surface. The waves are harder, the seas rise to flood rivers and spill up to lap at the lands, ruining their fields. Like any goddess she is a jealous thing and they should rely and worship no other but her, no false idols, nothing other than the bounty she so graciously provides, the bounty they are so greedy with. They disrespect her too, throwing away so many things, destroying her sea beds with their trawls and nets, drowning creatures, harpooning others to die slowly all for the sake of profit instead of taking with care.  
  
When her children rise as they did in forgotten days they come to claim what is rightfully hers for life began there, life crawled from her once to somewhere less harsh, somewhere they could grow soft and live without fear. She let them go. She is tamed only when she wishes it but it serves her well to pretend otherwise. An army of nightmares she unleashes on them, tempestuous and vengeful and nowhere is beyond her reach as she sends great waves the block out sun and sky to smash houses and not boats, to tear down mountains and sink fields.  
  
And when all is said and done, when she is sated and recedes back, her children dragging man, woman and child with them to their lairs to do as they will in her name for generations to come until they tire, the stragglers appear from the few places they hid. After all if she wiped them all out what would be left for her? That mistrust stems from ancient memory, from what they cannot explain. The fascination, the longing, that is her. A young woman lifts a water-stained book that should be ruined beyond all hope. But something reads it for her, finds words and meaning in smears of ink. She leads her flock into an upturned ghost of a ship covered in barnacles and sea weed, sponges and corals, crabs and worms writhing beneath their feet as she preaches with a hungry smile, speaking with a tongue made clumsy from poisoned barbs sunk deep into her mouth. Her heart is slow and steady. She stands atop a cliff at night and smiles down into the cavernous maw of the void and sings to it.  
  
She sends men and women off in their ships with blessings and curses, some to return with a bounty to feed those left behind and others to feed what in turn feeds them. She finds another girl so much like her and whispers things to her that make her toss and turn in her sleep. This one will take her place when she throws herself into the hungry mouth of the sea, this one will lead a new flock when the sea stirs again but for now she croons in horrible tongues of monsters, of truths the priestess does not tell them of.  
  
She feasts on jellied flesh of monsters sent up to her mixed with boiled bones and the pinker flesh of her followers or those washed up alongside driftwood and nets. She feeds her followers venomous truths and falsehoods with her poison tongue. Her smile is an awful blistered thing and she will never be trusted but they are devoted, they are obsessed.  
  
The harvest she will provide will be strong even as the little one regards her with unfriendly eyes, sneaking books and tattered pages. Little spoiled fool, let her know what it is to be ruined and remade. When the girl makes it to the chambers long after she has watched a priestess hurl herself into the sea from a crumbling cliff she is the one to hold open her mouth, to teach her words, to show her the army beneath the waves.  
  
"You have always belonged to the sea," she tells her little ruined creature who cries her tears into her shoulder, smothering her with her hair and phantom limbs, spider legs and tentacles of jellyfish and muscular octopus arms, an abomination, the true face of the sea. "It is time to provide to what has provided for you."  
  
She joins the army when they return to the surface and she gluts herself on fear and victory, salty-sweet upon her tongue.


End file.
